Citizens of Empire: Puerto Rico, Status, and Constitutional Change. Sam Erman

Transcription

1 Citizens of Empire: Puerto Rico, Status, and Constitutional Change Sam Erman TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION...3 I. U.S. RULE IN THE SHADOW OF THE CONSTITUTION, II. AMBIGUOUS DECLARATIONS: THE INSULAR CASES OF III. DEGETAU SEEKS CITIZENSHIP WITHOUT FILING SUIT, IV. DEGETAU TURNS TO TEST CASES FOR CITIZENSHIP, V. POST-DEGETAU POLITICS AND CONSTITUTIONAL SETTLEMENT...56 CONCLUSION...67 APPENDIX: LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS...74 Electronic copy available at:

2 Citizens of Empire: Puerto Rico, Status, and Constitutional Change Sam Erman * This Article proposes a new account of how empire became constitutional. When the United States took a deliberate imperial turn in by annexing Puerto Rico and the Philippines, many jurists thought that the Constitution automatically made these islands proto-states and their residents U.S. citizens with full constitutional protections. Three decades later, this view was no longer mainstream. Contrary to standard accounts, this momentous change was neither quick nor the result of unilateral judicial action. To perceive dynamics extending beyond the judiciary, this study examines the attempts to win U.S. citizenship for Puerto Ricans by their first representative in Washington, Federico Degetau y González. Aware that constitutional meaning was not exclusively the province of courts, he brought claims to U.S. citizenship before administrators, legislators, and the president as well. Officials responded with evasions through concessions. When Degetau sought a right as a citizen, they granted him it on other grounds. Meanings of U.S. citizenship changed as officials reduced the rights that would accompany a grant of citizenship while envisioning without endorsing the possibility of noncitizen U.S. nationals. That novel idea like the idea of U.S. lands that would never be states and U.S. people with less than full constitutional rights ripened into conventional wisdom and eventually still-binding doctrine. This suggests that the constitutional law of empire emerged as judges together with administrative and elected officials engaged in an iterative process in which they deployed forms of creative ambiguity to manage perceived conflicts between Constitution and empire. * Sam Erman is Latino Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution ( ). He holds a J.D. (2007) and Ph.D. in American Culture (2010) from the University of Michigan, clerked for Justices Anthony Kennedy and John Paul Stevens at the U.S. Supreme Court ( ) and for Judge Merrick Garland at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ( ), and was previously Raoul Berger-Mark DeWolfe Howe Legal History Fellow at Harvard Law School ( ). In addition to those acknowledged in his dissertation, see Erman, infra note 15, the author thanks Nicholas Bagley, Rabia Belt, Mary Sarah Bilder, the Honorable José Cabranes, Kristin Collins, Akiba Covitz, Kristina Daugirdas, Christine Desan, Holger Droessler, Linda Elliott, Dan Ernst, Richard Friedman, Sarah Barringer Gordon, Annette Gordon-Reed, Tom Green, Don Herzog, Jay Hook, Morton Horwitz, Michael Klarman, Jedidiah Kroncke, Adriaan Lanni, Julianna Lee, Sophia Lee, Kenneth Mack, Bruce Mann, Maeva Marcus, Serena Mayeri, Martha Minow, Gerald Neuman, William Novak, James Oldham, J.J. Prescott, Richard Primus, Gautham Rao, Emma Rothschild, Rebecca Scott, Jed Shugerman, Sonia Starr, Karen Tani, Mark Tushnet, his co-clerks and co-fellows, the Berger and Latino Studies Fellowship Programs, and the staffs of the Library of Congress, the Supreme Court Library, and the Harvard Law School Library. Archival abbreviations appear in the Appendix. Electronic copy available at:

3 2012] CITIZENS OF EMPIRE 3 R esident Commissioner Federico Degetau y González had a constitutional problem. As the first elected representative of Puerto Rico in Washington following U.S. invasion and annexation of the island in , he sought for his countrymen legal recognition as U.S. citizens. The status, he presumed, would bring with it full constitutional protections for islanders and classification of Puerto Rico as a traditional territory soon to be a state. In believing that the Constitution guaranteed these legal outcomes to his homeland, Degetau embraced a view held and opposed by many turn-of-the-last-century jurists: Constitution constrained empire. Annexation accorded status and rights. A quarter century later, Degetau s side had lost decisively. Its views had ceased to be mainstream. INTRODUCTION This paper proposes a new account of how empire became constitutional. It advances two interrelated claims. First, in 1898 and not twenty-five years later U.S. citizenship appeared to many to promise Puerto Ricans numerous substantive rights and full inclusion of their homeland within the U.S. polity. Second, judges, administrators, and elected officials all contributed to these and related constitutional changes through a slow, tentative, and iterative process characterized by creativity and ambiguity. Several corollaries follow. As Degetau realized and contrary to what has come to be the standard rendering this sea change in constitutional thought was not the quick product of unilateral judicial action having little to do with citizenship. 1 It was also not here in contraposition to scholarship on roles of judge and turn-ofthe-last-century administrators the result of purely political dynamics divorced from courts, administration, and law. 2 And it did not as some work implies merely confirm what the Slaughter- House Cases (1873) had long before declared or made a fait accompli: 1 See infra notes 21, 96, 329, 342, and accompanying text. 2 See infra notes 5-10, 14-18, 48, 94, 126 and accompanying text.

4 4 CITIZENS OF EMPIRE [2012 the transformation of U.S. citizenship into a relatively inconsequential status. 3 The puzzle that these insights help solve is how, despite a dearth of unambiguous, far-reaching Supreme Court holdings, conventional understandings of the constitutional order shifted: away from according U.S. citizenship and robust rights to all nontribal U.S. people and toward acceptance of U.S. colonialism. Apparently presuming that such momentous legal changes trailed correspondingly important, new, and binding judicial statements, much work in the area seeks an elusive prize: dramatic holdings in the series of post-1900 Insular Cases through which the Supreme Court addressed the status of newly acquired U.S. people and places. 4 Other studies question whether law even factored as a causal force in these and most other official matters. 5 And it is conventional casebook wisdom that those like Degetau who brought early-20 th - century legal claims based on U.S. citizenship misperceived the status, which the Court had stripped of significance more than a decade before. 6 This project navigates these scholarly shoals in part by building upon recent work reasserting the prominent and complex roles of administration, courts, and law in the late-19 th - and early-20 th - century U.S. state. 7 Such work insists that the language of law 3 83 U.S. 36. On characterizations of the Slaughter-House Cases as having largely foreclosed most claims predicated on U.S. citizenship, see infra notes 6, 56. On overstatements of the extent to which the Slaughter-House Cases represented judicial abandonment of former slaves, see PAMELA BRANDWEIN, RETHINKING THE JUDICIAL SETTLEMENT OF RECONSTRUCTION 53 (2011). 4 See infra notes See, e.g., FINLEY PETER DUNNE, MR. DOOLEY S OPINIONS 26 (1901) (making this point, via a fictional commentator, by writing th supreme coort follows th iliction returns ); infra note 8. 6 See infra note 56; supra note 3. 7 On the need for the corrective, see, for example, Paul Frymer, Law and American Political Development, 33 L. & SOC. INQUIRY 779 (2008) (arguing that American Political Development scholars have tended to underestimate the institutional nature of courts); Keith E. Whittington, Once More Unto the Breach: PostBehavioralist Approaches to Judicial Politics, 25 L. & SOC. INQUIRY 601, 613 (2000) (calling for a better understanding in American Political Development of how law influences judges); Jerry L. Mashaw, Federal Administration and Administrative Law in the Gilded Age, 119 YALE L.J. 1362, 1365 (2010) (offering a corrective to Am erican Political Development accounts of muscular administration only emerging in the 1930s); Reuel Schiller, Saint George and the Dragon : Courts and the Development of the Administrative State in Twentieth- Century America, 17 J. POL Y HIST. 110 (2005) ( noting the scarcity of American Political Development work concerning the judiciary); Thomas M. Keck, Party Politics or Judicial

5 2012] CITIZENS OF EMPIRE 5 structured exercises of power by officials throughout the federal government, that those exercises of power altered law, and that courts were but one among many state institutions contributing to the dynamic. 8 Administrative entities were others, with some securing top-flight legal talent that aimed to shape and follow the law in the myriad disputes that they were the first and sometimes only governmental bodies to adjudicate. 9 This work challenges scholars to show how courts, administration, and law interacted with each other and other state institutions to alter U.S. governance and constitutional meaning across time. 10 The protagonist, period, and topic of this case study Degetau s early-20 th -century struggles to secure U.S. citizenship for Puerto Ricans and their legacy are promising ones through which to examine these dynamics. In , the United States took a deliberate turn toward empire by annexing first Hawai i and then following a war in which it invaded several Spanish imperial holdings Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. 11 Doing so raised hard questions about island and mainland constitutionalism and their interrelationship. Within Puerto Rico, the change in sovereignty presaged a change in constitutional structure and derivative changes Independence? The Regime Politics Literature Hits the Law Schools, 32 L. & SOC. INQUIRY 511, 517 (2007) (arguing that Regime Th eory scholars too often presume that governing coalitions dictate judicial results); Bradley W. Joondeph, The Many Meanings of Politics in Judicial Decision Making, 77 UNIV. MO. KAN. L. REV. 347, (2008); infra notes 15, 130. On work of an earlier vintage consistent with this newer scholarship, see, for example, Robert W. Gordon, Critical Legal Histories, 36 STAN. L. REV. 57 (1984) (refusing to separate law from society as a politics - driven model would require and recognizing the autonomy of law); FRANCIS PAUL PRUCHA, THE GREAT FATHER (1984) (tracing extensive federal involvement in Indian affairs, including through administrative action). To avoid confusion as I examine the relationship of a Latin American place and people to the United States of America, I eschew the perhaps-familiar term American state in favor of the more specific U.S. state. 8 See infra notes 94, 96, , Decrying work portraying courts actions as wholly derivative of other political forces, scholars associated with American Political Development have begun to call for work that brings law back in in the ways described above. See, e.g., Frymer, supra note 7 (collecting sources). 9 See infra note See Sophia Z. Lee, Race, Sex, and Rulemaking: Administrative Constitutionalism and the Workplace, 1960 to the Present, 96 VA. L. REV. 799 (2010); Sophia Z. Lee, Hotspots in a Cold War: The NAACP s Postwar Workplace Constitutionalism, , 26 L. & HIST. REV. 327 (2008). 11 See infra notes 34, 52.

6 6 CITIZENS OF EMPIRE [2012 in rights, status, and self-government perhaps, as Degetau hoped, bringing liberal reforms and home rule, and perhaps not. On the mainland, the U.S. imperial turn brought debates over the compatibility of empire and Constitution to the forefront of U.S. law and politics. 12 Many mainlanders believed that the Constitution barred the United States from holding colonized U.S. peoples without extending them U.S. citizenship, full constitutional rights, and eventual statehood. Many others and often the same people believed that denying each of these rights to newly acquired populations was necessary to U.S. imperial success. The first half decade of the 20th century was formative in establishing the ambiguous-yet-subordinate place of the new possessions of the United States in its constitutional system. 13 During the period, while campaigning to be and then serving as Resident Commissioner, Degetau studied and joined constitutional debates concerning newly acquired U.S. people and places. In Washington, this brilliant lawyer and keen, engaged observer of legal-political interactions among state actors steeped himself in questions of Puerto Rican status and rights. Bringing to advocacy of U.S. citizenship for Puerto Ricans a fluid and experimental approach in which he exploited opportunities as they arose, Degetau tested the bounds of varied federal officials ability and willingness to recognize his countrymen as fellow citizens. Degetau well knew that the state with which he interacted was not one solely dominated by in Stephen Skowronek s memorable phrase courts and parties. 14 Judges, administrators, presidents, 12 See Jon M. Van Dyke, The Evolving Legal Relationships between the United States and Its Affiliated U.S.-Flag Islands, 14 UNIV. HAW. L. REV. 445, (1992). 13 See, e.g., BARTHOLOMEW H. SPARROW, THE INSULAR CASES AND THE EMERGENCE OF AMERICAN EMPIRE (2006). For works focused on Puerto Rico, see, for example, PEDRO A. CABÁN, CONSTRUCTING A COLONIAL PEOPLE (1999); José A. Cabranes, Citizenship and American Empire: Notes on the Legislative History of United States Citizenship of Puerto Ricans, 127 U. PA. L. REV. 391 (1978); ÉFREN RIVERA RAMOS, THE LEGAL CONSTRUCTION OF IDENTITY (2001); JUAN R. TORRUELLA, THE SUPREME COURT AND PUERTO RICO (1985); FOREIGN IN A DOMESTIC SENSE (Christina Duffy Burnett & Burke Marshall, eds., 2001); Christina Duffy Burnett, Untied States: American Expansion and Territorial Deannexation, 72 U. CHI. L. REV. 797 (2005); infra notes 21, and accompanying text. 14 Skowronek observed the uneven influence of administrative institutions in this period when he introduced the courts-and-parties formulation in Building a New American State (1982). On the nonetheless enduring influence of the concept as an impediment to perceiving the full

7 2012] CITIZENS OF EMPIRE 7 and congressmen all played roles in constitutional change and adjudication. 15 Individuals within each group noted as colleagues elsewhere in the state addressed constitutional questions arising out of the U.S. imperial turn. And actors within all these groups addressed such questions themselves. 16 Constrained by an official landscape that they could also alter, they thus exercised bounded autonomy in addressing constitutional disputes. 17 Though often overlooked by existing scholarship, U.S. administrators were among crucial agents of early-20 th -century constitutional changes concerning U.S. empire. Through adjudicating disputes over Puerto Rican rights: They created potential judicial test cases. And they modeled and altered the stakes for the Court of various approaches to judging the scope of administrative influence in the U.S. state, see, for example, Richard R. John, Rethinking the Early American State, 40 POLITY 332 (2008). 15 Cf. Reuel E. Schiller, Rulemaking s Promise: Administrative Law and Legal Culture in the 1960s and 1970s, 53 ADMIN. L. REV (2001) (m aking a similar point about administrative law). On the importance of legal thinking throughout the U.S. state, see, for example, William J. Novak, The Myth of the Weak American State, 113 AM. HIST. REV. 752, (2008) (collecting sources); John Fabian Witt, Law and War in American History, 115 AM. HIST. REV. 768, (2010); Sam Erman, Puerto Rico and the Promise of United States Citizenship: Struggles around Status in a New Empire, , at 31-35, 148, 153 (2010) (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan), available at (elaborating examples below); KEITH E WHITTINGTON, POLITICAL FOUNDATIONS OF JUDICIAL SUPREMACY 52-53, passim (2009) (casting c onstitutional reconstruction as a key task for presidents establishing new political regimes); Daniel R. Ernst, Dicey s Disciple on the D.C. Circuit: Judge Harold Stephens and Administrative Law Reform, , 90 GEO. L.J. 787 (2002); Daniel R. Ernst, Ernst Freund, Felix Frankfurter, and the American Rechtsstaat: A Transatlantic Shipwreck, , 23 STUD. AM. POL. DEV. 171 (2009). 16 In addition to the instances detailed below, see Erman, supra note 15, at Compare, e.g., Gordon Silverstein, Law s Allure in American Politics and Policy: What It Is, What It Is Not, and What It Might Be Yet, 35 L. & SOC. INQUIRY 1077, 1089 (2010) (arguing that state actors may act in conjunction without consciously cooperating), with WHITTINGTON, supra note 15, at (describing how elected federal officials may signal their desires to courts); Luke M. Milligan, Congressional End-Run: The Ignored Constraint on Judicial Review, 45 GA. L. REV. 211 (2010) (similar); cf. Silverstein, supra, at 1080 ( [T]o fully appreciate and understand how law shapes and constrains politics and policy, we have to consider the iterated interaction between and among these institutions.... ). Variations on this question are longstanding in legal history. See, e.g., Gordon, supra note 7. For more recent works along these lines, see, for example, Frymer, supra note 7, at 794, 782 (reviewing work arguing that no one paradigmatic understanding of judicial decision making can independently explain the Court s logic and seeking new inquiries into the relationship between an institutional understanding of courts and how courts play an often central and vital role in enhancing the power of the modern state ). 17 See infra note 126.

8 8 CITIZENS OF EMPIRE [2012 constitutionality of U.S. empire. In some instances, they proposed legal underpinnings for U.S. empire that came to be reflected in Supreme Court doctrine. 18 Degetau s activities and networks also reveal lost legal transformations. Most immediate is that of U.S. citizenship, which Degetau relentlessly sought for Puerto Ricans in At the dawn of the 20 th century, U.S. citizenship was a consequential status, though also an embattled one. Jurists throughout and beyond the federal government trumpeted its importance, insisted upon its broad distribution within the states, and sought and discussed the many subconstitutional rights that attached to it, even as they recognized the paucity of judicially enforceable constitutional rights that it carried. Perceived by many to be too substantive for Puerto Ricans immediately after 1898, it had come to be referred to as a perfectly empty gift by the time the political branches naturalized Puerto Ricans but not Filipinos in Somewhat counterintuitively, recognition that courts lacked sole responsibility for legal change reveals as important to-dateunderemphasized cases, doctrines, and judicial acts. An Insular Case in which Degetau participated as amicus curiæ, Gonzales v. Williams (1904), 20 illustrates, illuminating how justices were one set of actors among several contributing to the slow decline in the promise of U.S. citizenship for Puerto Ricans. Today, the Insular Cases are best known for introducing into U.S. law the still-binding doctrine of territorial nonincorporation, which marks some U.S. possessions as not necessarily destined for statehood and deprives those resident 18 For other work along these lines, see Anuj C. Desai, Wiretapping Before the Wires: The Post Office and the Birth of Communications Privacy, 60 STAN. L. REV. 553 (2007) (suggesting that federal legislation and administrative practice lay foundations for modern Fourth Amendment jurisprudence); Reuel E. Schiller, Free Speech and Expertise: Administrative Censorship and the Birth of the Modern First Amendment, 86 VA. L. REV.1 (2000) (various ly describing instances of administrative regulations of speech being supplanted by and surviving judicial regulation under the First Amendment); Lee, supra note 10, at 809 & n.23 (collecting sources focused exclusively on the work of the President s closest legal advisors ). 19 See infra note 292 and accompanying text U.S. 1 (1904).

9 2012] CITIZENS OF EMPIRE 9 there of constitutional protection of non-fundamental rights. 21 In Gonzales, a unanimous Court settled another controversy, holding that Puerto Ricans were not aliens, hence not subject to immigration laws, while reserving the harder question whether they were U.S. citizens. The reservation unsettled the presumption that early-20 th - century administrative and judicial officials and claimants frequently shared with Degetau that citizenship was identical to nonalienage. The Court s evasion by concession signaled to many that U.S. citizenship would come to Puerto Rico, if at all, via the political branches. And as numerous other federal officials also evaded claims to citizenship by extending islanders various rights, the benefits that Puerto Ricans could expect to secure as a result of naturalization shrank. The Gonzales decision thus came to matter because of its contribution to interrelated processes of constitutional change and colonial governance already unfolding across diverse parts of the U.S. state. Proceeding as one albeit unique legal and political actor among many, the Gonzales Court combined creativity and ambiguity to facilitate U.S. empire without explicitly altering the constitutional law of U.S. citizenship. 22 As we will see, recognizing this dynamic in Gonzales points the way to a wider reinterpretation of the Insular Cases. On most scholarly accounts, the Supreme Court in issued broad holdings that laid the constitutional foundations for U.S. empire. 23 But as Gonzales illustrates, the Supreme Court did not always rush into the breach. Through evasions, it also sometimes created space for nonjudicial federal officials to maneuver and innovate. 24 This suggests that Gonzales and the Insular Cases more generally may be best understood as part of an iterative, joint process of constitutional change that spanned the federal government, unfolded across 21 See infra notes and accompanying text. For works defining and listing Insular Cases, see, for example, SPARROW, supra note 13; Christina Duffy Burnett, A Note on the Insular Cases, in FOREIGN IN A DOMESTIC SENSE, supra note 13, at See infra note 243 and accompanying text. 23 See, e.g., infra notes 329, 342, and accompanying text. 24 On policymakers implementing policies iteratively in interaction with courts rather than risking repeated reversals, see, for example, Silverstein, supra note 16, at ,

10 10 CITIZENS OF EMPIRE [2012 decades, and proceeded through creative ambiguity. 25 Confirming and detailing the mechanics of the process is grist for another project. This study seeks to bring its broad contours into view: As I discuss at greater length in the Conclusion, close study of what Degetau did, saw, and helped set in motion both demonstrates the close relationship between officials shared commitments to law and processes of constitutional change and uncovers particular official acts that set such change in motion. Five parts and the Conclusion follow this Introduction. The first sketches Degetau s background and then traces his and certain U.S. officials responses to consolidation in of U.S. rule in Puerto Rico. Those responses unfolded in the shadow of the Constitution, and Degetau s included his development of a theory aimed at reconciling major strands of U.S. and Puerto Rican thought on constitutionalism. Part II provides a brief account of relevant aspects of the 1901 Insular Cases, the Court s first major and stillambiguous statement on the constitutional implications of the U.S. imperial turn of In Part III, Degetau returns to center stage for his inaugural term ( ) as his island s first elected representative in Washington as Resident Commissioner. As such, he sought to win acceptance for his ideas among U.S. administrative officials, among others. Degetau turned to courts in , Part IV relates, launching efforts that notably included the 1904 Supreme Court case of Gonzales v. Williams. Part V surveys the largely nonjudicial fights over Puerto Rican status in the years after Degetau s term ended in 1905, noting how prior judicial decisions shaped those battles, the outcomes of which courts eventually confirmed. The study concludes with observations on relationships between law and U.S. empire; on meanings of the Insular Cases; and on how officials shared commitments to law and particular of their 25 See infra notes and accompanying text; compare JOSÉ TRÍAS MONGE, PUERTO RICO (1997) (noting that the Insular Cases, for instance, lay groundwork for muscular U.S. imperial rule in Puerto Rico) with Burnett, supra note 13, at 838 (noting that for at least one purpose the Insular Cases treated Puerto Rico as compared to traditional U.S. territories more like a state of the union), and Sanford Levinson, Why the Canon Should be Expanded to Include the Insular Cases and the Saga of American Expansionism, 17 CONST. COMM. 241, 261 (2000) (noting ways that the Insular Cases created greater potential space vis-à-vis traditional U.S. territories for multiculturalism-based innovations).

11 2012] CITIZENS OF EMPIRE 11 interactions with each other drove instances of early-20 th -century U.S. constitutional change. I. U.S. RULE IN THE SHADOW OF THE CONSTITUTION, Degetau s trajectory to relentless advocate of U.S. citizenship for all Puerto Ricans proceeded in stages. As a young man, he became immersed and prominent in a political movement seeking liberal reforms and autonomy for Puerto Rico. U.S. invasion and annexation of his island then provided him new opportunities to realize these ends. He came to believe that pursuit of U.S. citizenship was the key to doing so. And he persisted in that position even as some U.S. officials and jurists came to quite different conclusions. Degetau began his life amidst liberalism and bondage. His parents hosted meetings of leading liberals in their home, their western-european and Puerto Rican relatives included abolitionists, and his father died owning a young man named Chalí as a slave. 26 As a Puerto Rican native, Degetau was also part of a population that held an intermediate status within imperial Spain. Spain favored its citizens born on the Iberian Peninsula over those of island birth and only sometimes in the years after Degetau s birth extended Puerto Ricans full constitutional rights and proportionate national-level representation. 27 Consonant with his emerging status as a Puerto Rican gentleman, Degetau earned a law degree in continental Spain in 1888, cultivated liberal causes and associates, and joined a liberalrepublican Puerto Rican political party the Partido Autonomista that sought greater individual civil and political liberties and island autonomy from Spain. 28 That party fractured in 1898 over whether to ally with a monarchical Spanish party willing in return to support 26 See ÁNGEL M. MERGAL, FEDERICO DEGETAU (1944); Untitled document, May 27, 1864, CIHCAM 6/VII/ See, e.g., infra notes ; TRÍAS MONGE, supra note 25, at See MERGAL, supra note 26, at 39-46; TRÍAS MONGE, supra note 25, at 11; Copy, Certificate of Federico Degetau upon receiving his law license, Oct. 29, 1888, in A. M. Melgar, Documentación relacionada con la vida y la obra de D. Federico Degetau, 1941, 29, CIHCAM 20/L2. Degetau s liberal causes and associates included advocating mandatory international arbitration and discussing death-penalty abolition with Victor Hugo. See Delegate from Porto Rico, TIMES, Worthington, Ind., [Dec. 1900?], available at CIHCAM 22/L1; see also Certification of membership in El Porvenir, Jan. 20, 1882, CIHCAM 6/VII/16; MERGAL, supra note 26, at

12 12 CITIZENS OF EMPIRE [2012 Puerto Rican autonomy. 29 As former co-partisans including a rising star in the party named Luis Muñoz Rivera embraced the alliance, Degetau split off to form a competing political organization. 30 In the elections that followed in early 1898, Degetau s new opponents won handily, installing Muñoz Rivera at the head of the cabinet-like island Council of Secretaries. 31 U.S. troops arrived on July 25, The looming U.S. annexation brought Puerto Rico into a United States riven by race and just coming to self-identify as imperial. 32 While this study does not seek to define empire or race, relying instead on historical actors unstated intuitions and conventional language, some preliminary observations will illuminate the questions that the paper does tackle. 33 Despite differences over what 29 MERGAL, supra note 26, at 50, GONZALO F. CÓRDOVA, RESIDENT COMMISSIONER, SANTIAGO IGLESIAS AND HIS TIMES 26-27, 31, 33-37, (1993). 30 CÓRDOVA, supra note 29, at 26-27, 31, 33-37, 53-55, 60; TRÍAS MONGE, supra note 25, at 11-15; FERNANDO BAYRON TORO, ELECCIONES Y PARTIDOS POLÍTICOS DE PUERTO RICO & n.153 (1977); Document, Oct. 22, 1898, AG/DE/SPR/COS, C.F. 74, D.P., 1898; José Barbosa to Federico Degetau, July 11, 1898, CIHCAM 2/III/ BAYRON TORO, supra note 30, at & n.153; Geo W. Davis, Report of Brig. Gen. Geo. W. Davis, U.S.V., on Civil Affairs of Puerto Rico. 1899, in 1 ANNUAL REPORTS OF THE WAR DEPARTMENT FOR THE FISCAL YEAR ENDED JUNE 30, 1899, at 477, 486 (1899); Apertura de las camaras, EL LIBERAL, July 18, The election resulted when, following the schism between Muñoz Rivera s faction and that of Degetau, Muñoz Rivera s allies in Spain came to power and extended Puerto Rico relatively broad autonomy. After having secured those gains, Muñoz Rivera and his allies were able to win a resounding victory in 1898 over Degetau s faction, which secured just 20% of the vote. See, e.g., Erman, supra note 15, at 21-22, On racial views of U.S. administrators and politicians and their relationships to the policies that they adopted, see, for example, Cabranes, supra note 13 (discussing Puerto Rico); Lanny Thompson, The Imperial Republic: A Comparison of the Insular Territories under U.S. Dominion after 1898, 71 PAC. HIST. REV. 535 (2002); PAUL A. KRAMER, THE BLOOD OF GOVERNMENT (2006) (Philippines); LOUIS A. PÉREZ, JR., CUBA BETWEEN EMPIRES, (1983); PRUCHA, supra note 7 (American Indians). On similar dynamics involving Supreme Court justices and their decisions concerning U.S. imperial holdings, see, for example, MARK S. WEINER, AMERICANS WITHOUT LAW (2008); Erman, supra note 15, at ; Juan F. Perea, Fulfilling Manifest Destiny: Conquest, Race, and the Insular Cases, in FOREIGN IN A DOMESTIC SENSE, supra, at 140; infra note 111 and accompanying text. See also Rogers M. Smith, The Bitter Roots of Puerto Rican Citizenship, in FOREIGN IN A DOMESTIC SENSE, supra, at (observing the role of racial thinking in legal debates over empire); PAUL T. MCCARTNEY, POWER AND PROGRESS (2006) (tackling relationships of social Darwinism, race, religion, constitutionalism, and empire). 33 These matters merit and have received much fuller treatment in work that makes them its focus. See, e.g., Sam Erman, Meanings of Citizenship in the U.S. Empire: Puerto Rico, Isabel Gonzalez, and the Supreme Court, 1895 to 1905, 27 J. AM. ETHNIC HIST. 5 (2 008) [hereinafter, Erman, Meanings of Citizenship] (focusing, inter alia, both on contemporary views of Puerto Rican racial character race that differed from those that Degetau advanced and on the elisions

13 2012] CITIZENS OF EMPIRE 13 empire meant and whether it was desirable, 34 a broad consensus existed in the turn-of-the-last-century United States that the most recent U.S. annexations were imperial in nature and in purported contrast to prior U.S. acquisitions newly so. 35 U.S. racial schemas and manipulations that Degetau deployed in portraying leading Puerto Rican men as white); Erman, supra note 15 (similar); Sam Erman, Reconstruction and Empire (Feb. 16, 2012) (unpublished manuscript, on file with author) [hereinafter Erman, Reconstruction and Empire] (similar). For a sample of scholarship making progress on interrelationships between race, legal-policy, and empire, see Thompson, supra note 32 (examining how perceived racial differences among colonized U.S. peoples resulted in differential official treatment); KRAMER, supra note 32 (investigating the relationship between U.S. racial thinking and U.S. policy in the Philippines); Mark S. Weiner, Teutonic Constitutionalism: The Role of Ethno-Juridical Discourse in the Spanish-American War, in FOREIGN IN A DOMESTIC SENSE, supra note 13, at 48 (describing recourse to concepts of Anglo-Saxon superiority in congressional and Supreme Court decisionmaking). 34 A century after the U.S. imperial turn, scholars have taken a similar turn toward empire. For an early example, see AMY KAPLAN, THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE IN THE MAKING OF U.S. CULTURE (2003). No such turn was required for scholars already working on U.S. territories acquired by the United States in 1898, see, e.g., FOREIGN IN A DOMESTIC SENSE, supra note 13; TRÍAS MONGE, supra note 25, which included work on links between, race, empire, and law, see, e.g., José A. Cabranes, Puerto Rico: Colonialism as Constitutional Doctrine, 100 HARV. L. REV. 450, (1986) (reviewing TORRUELLA, supra note 13). On prior U.S. expansion, conquest, and territorial governance, see, for example, JACK ERICSON EBLEN, THE FIRST AND SECOND UNITED STATES EMPIRES (1968); Sarah H. Cleveland, Powers Inherent in Sovereignty: Indians, Aliens, Territories, and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of Plenary Power over Foreign Relations, 81 TEXAS L. REV. 1 (2002). On as an imperial turn, see, for example, Adlai E. Stevenson et al., Bryan or McKinley? The Present Duty of American Citizens 171 N. AM. REV. 433 (1900) (arguing from an anti-imperialist/democratic perspective that then-contemporary imperialism was altogether new to the United States); Walter Lafeber, The Lion in the Path : The U.S. Emergence as a World Power, 101 POL. SCI. Q. 705, 705 (1986); SPARROW, supra note 13, at 3-9, 40; JUAN R. TORRUELLA, GLOBAL INTRIGUES (2007) [hereinafter TORRUELLA, GLOBAL INTRIGUES]. 35 See, e.g., ROBERT L. BEISNER, TWELVE AGAINST EMPIRE (1968). Among mainlanders reasons for holding this view were several perceived distinctions between the expansions of and those that had preceded them: The most recent expansions caused other empires to treat the United States as a peer. In governing the new U.S. lands, U.S. officials explicitly looked to other empires practices as models and negative examples. See, e.g., Cabán, supra note 13, at 2, 58 (U.S. borrowing from other empires); PHILIP C. JESSUP, ELIHU ROOT 345 (1938) (attempts to construct a distinctly U.S. empire); TORRUELLA, GLOBAL INTRIGUES, supra note 34 (U.S. emergence as an imperial power). The new possessions were not contiguous with the United States or reachable from it by land; many lay quite far from the mainland. See, e.g., Brief for the United States at 37, 58, Gonzales v. Williams, 192 U.S. 1 (No 225). A temporal break of three decades separated from the last major U.S. territorial expansion. See Erman, Reconstruction and Empire, supra note 33 (discussing implications of this pause in U.S. expansion). The recently annexed people formed large, dense, and racially suspect populations. See, e.g., Frederic R. Coudert, Jr., Our New Peoples: Citizens, Subjects, Nationals or Aliens, 3 COLUM. L. REV. 13 (1903). And it was not clear that the newly U.S. lands would become states or that the newly U.S. people would become U.S. citizens. See, e.g., SPARROW supra note 13, at 5, (summarizing contemporary legal-academic debates).

14 14 CITIZENS OF EMPIRE [2012 also differed from those in Puerto Rico and other new U.S. possessions. In pre-annexation Puerto Rico, for instance, men recognized as of European descent like Degetau had occupied top rungs in the social order. Afterward, mainland U.S. public opinion often deprecated all Puerto Ricans as racially mixed regardless of the self-proclaimed status of many political leaders there as sons of Spain. 36 To the extent that the U.S. public accepted leading Puerto Rican men s presentations of themselves as essentially Spanish, it still often perceived them as a darker shade of pale than its increasingly Anglo-Saxon measure of whiteness. 37 As Degetau quickly perceived, the U.S. invasion also hit politics on the island like a hurricane, variously washing away, leaving unscathed, and wholly upending aspects of the landscape. 38 Concern with Spanish policies had disappeared. Muñoz Rivera s and Degetau s competing political alliances emerged largely intact. 39 And 36 EILEEN J. SUÁREZ FINDLAY, IMPOSING DECENCY 57 (1999); see also MATTHEW FRYE JACOBSON, BARBARIAN VIRTUES (2000). Other Puerto Ricans including some early political leaders at times rejected their colleagues claims to whiteness. Aware that Muñoz Rivera was closely associated with the sons of Spain formulation, for instance, Republicano leader of color José Celso Barbosa, discussed infra at note 44 and in accompanying text, sought electoral advantage following the end of Spanish rule by criticizing Muñoz Rivera and his partisans as being for los blancos (the whites) and los españoles (the Spaniards). Miriam Jiménez Román, Un hombre (negro) del pueblo: José Barbosa and the Puerto Rican Race Toward Whiteness, 8 CENTRO 8, 17 (1996). Here, Barbosa contemplated islanders of color playing central roles in the leadership and electorate of Puerto Rico. Though Degetau and Barbosa were members of the same island political party, Degetau more steadfastly portrayed Puerto Rican leaders as essentially white. 37 On the concept of the Anglo-Saxon and its relationship to scientific racism and U.S. white mainstream thought on American Indians and Filipinos, see, e.g., Weiner, supra note 33. On perceived racial differences among those of European descent, see MATTHEW FRYE JACOBSON, WHITENESS OF A DIFFERENT COLOR (1998). For overviews of the triumph among mainstream whites of a white-supremacist ideology that embraced a tragic legend of Reconstruction and of related processes of black disfranchisement and imposition of Jim Crow regimes, see, for example, DAVID W. BLIGHT, RACE AND REUNION (2001); MARK ELLIOTT, COLOR-BLIND JUSTICE 248 (2006); REBECCA J. SCOTT, DEGREES OF FREEDOM 87, , 200, 259 (2005); C. VANN WOODWARD, ORIGINS OF THE NEW SOUTH, , at 322 (rev. ed. 1999); Rebecca J. Scott, Public Rights, Social Equality, and the Conceptual Roots of the Plessy Challenge, 106 MICH. L. REV. 777 (2008); Richard H. Pildes, Democracy, Anti-Democracy, and the Canon, 17 CONST. COMM. 295, & n.29 (2000); BRANDWEIN, supra note 3, at 7, 10, Title unknown, LA NUEVA ERA, Nov. 22, 1898, available at CIHCAM 12/L2; Title and newspaper unknown, Nov. 22, 1898, available at CIHCAM 12/L2. 39 Degetau, consequently, remained associated with the political party that had decisively lost the most recent island-wide election.

15 2012] CITIZENS OF EMPIRE 15 the United States took center stage as an object of and participant in island debates. Though U.S. military officials had initially reconstituted the Council of Secretaries, on February 5, 1899, they ordered its heads to report directly to U.S. military governor Guy Henry. 40 Muñoz Rivera and his colleagues resigned in protest and unavailingly appealed to Washington. 41 Muñoz s setbacks facilitated gains by Degetau, who secured a vacancy as one of four top civilian officers on the island. 42 When Spain and the United States formalized U.S. annexation of Puerto Rico via the Treaty of Paris, Degetau and his co-partisans reconstituted themselves into a new political party, which they called Republicano. 43 Doing so reflected and sought to extend their alignment with mainland Republicans and as a result of Republicans commitment to U.S. retention of Puerto Rico with an empire-state that many islanders perceived to be a modern, affluent model of democracy. José Celso Barbosa a prominent man of color in Puerto Rico who had experienced Republican politics in the 1870s while on the mainland headed the Partido Republicano, which also found in the alliance an opportunity to align with progressive 40 H.R. DOC. NO , at (1909). 41 Id.; Headquarters, Dep t of P.R., General Order No. 17, Feb, 10, 1899, in, ANNUAL REPORTS OF THE WAR DEPARTMENT FOR THE FISCAL YEAR ENDED JUNE 30, 1899, at 576 (1900); Muñoz Rivera en los Estados Unidos, LA DEMOCRACIA, May 3, 1899, 2; CABÁN, supra note 13, at General Order No. 15, in H.R. DOC. NO (1909). 43 F. DEGETAU Y GONZALEZ, TO THE PEOPLE ( [1900?]); Treaty of Peace between the United States of America and the Kingdom of Spain, Dec. 10, 1898, 30 Stat. 1754; TO THE PEOPLE / AL PAÍS, ([1899?]), available at CIHCAM 22/L1.

16 16 CITIZENS OF EMPIRE [2012 Republicans and against Democratic segregationists. 44 Muñoz Rivera and his allies soon reorganized themselves into the Partido Federal. 45 Throughout 1899, Degetau built on his reputation by mastering English and developing expertise in U.S. law and politics. 46 As he was well-positioned to see, debates during these months continued to rage in the United States over the fitness of newly acquired peoples like Puerto Ricans and especially Filipinos 47 for selfgovernment and U.S. membership and over constitutional meanings of U.S. empire. 48 While the McKinley administration moved ahead with imperial governance, self-described anti-imperialists mobilized half a million American contributors and powerful spokespeople in opposition to what they perceived to be a policy that violated the Constitution, transgressed U.S. liberal-democratic ideals, and perhaps most importantly to many threatened the U.S. racial order. 49 Their efforts failed to block formal annexation of formerly Spanish lands but did secure a Senate Resolution declaring that the body did not intend[] to incorporate the inhabitants of the Philippines into citizenship of the United States See Erman, Reconstruction and Empire, supra note 33. Although those who favored Republican expansionism often spoke in terms of the white man s burden, Thomas R. McHale, American Colonial Policy Towards the Philippines, 3 J. S.E. ASIAN HIST. 24, (1962) (quoting President McKinley), it was anti-imperialists and Democrats who tended to make the harshest comments concerning the racial characters of the newest U.S. peoples, see, e.g., Erman, Reconstruction and Empire, supra; infra note 184 and accompanying text. For descriptions of Barbosa as a man de color (of color), see, for example, SANTIAGO IGLESIAS PANTÍN, 1 LUCHAS EMANCIPADORAS (CRÓNICAS DE PUERTO RICO) 59 (2d ed [1929]). Barbosa himself used the phrase, describing his as the party of the men of color. FINDLAY, supra note 36, at (quoting, inter alia, the newspapers La Defensa and El Águila). 45 PROGRAM DEL PARTIDO FEDERAL 10 ([1899?]), available at CIHCAM 6/L3. 46 Federico Degetau to Adolfo Marin, [Mar. or Apr. 1899?], CIHCAM 2/IV/13; F. Degetau y Gonzales, Antecedentes del debate: I. Economicos, EL PAÍS, Mar. 4, 1900, available at CIHCAM 18/L2; La constitución Americana: conferencia de Degetau, EL PAÍS, Apr. 17, 1900, available at CIHCAM 12/L2; F. Degetau y Gonzalez, Educacion civica, Parts I-VI, paper unknown, [Aug. 1900?], available at CIHCAM 12/L2. 47 See, e.g., Cabranes, supra note 13, at , ; Allen H. Merriam, Racism in the Expansionist Controversy of , 39 PHYLON 369 (1978). 48 On the use of constitutional idioms to justify empire, see Juan R. Torruella, The Insular Cases: The Establishment of a Regime of Political Apartheid, 29 U. PA. J. INT L L. 283, (2007); JOHN HART ELY, WAR AND RESPONSIBILITY (1995). 49 BEISNER, supra note 35, at 216, , McEnery Resolution Adopted, Los Angeles Times, Feb. 15, 1899, 2.

17 2012] CITIZENS OF EMPIRE 17 Jurists during this period struggled to reconcile the potentially colonial U.S. imperial turn to Reconstruction-era legal developments that many still saw as embodying more egalitarian principles. 51 For nearly three decades following ratification of the Reconstruction Amendments, U.S. territorial expansion had stopped. 52 As a result, the status of newly annexed people under those Reconstruction Amendments remained an open and untested question. It was possible and controversial to argue in 1898 that the 14 th and 15 th Amendments and the Constitution that they modified made all nontribal U.S. peoples including those of color into both U.S. citizens with substantive privileges and immunities and citizens of a state or of a territory on the road to statehood. 53 For their part, Supreme Court justices treated citizenship ambivalently, variously celebrating its significance, 54 reaffirming its broad distribution within the states of the Union, 55 and construing it to provide few judiciable constitutional rights. 56 Against this backdrop, U.S. jurists also 51 On the relationship between the U.S. imperial turn and legacies of the Civil War, see BLIGHT, supra note 37, at 291, , 472 n.24; SCOTT, supra note 37, at ; WOODWARD, supra note 37, at ; Levinson, supra note 25, at ; supra note See Downes v. Bidwell, 182 U.S. 244, , (1901) (White, J., concurring); Treaty of Peace between the United States of America and the Kingdom of Spain, Dec. 10, 1898, 30 Stat. 1754, 1755 (Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines); cf. Newlands Resolution, 30 Stat. 750 (1898) (Hawai i); Van Dyke, supra note 12, at (describing extension of U.S. sovereignty over Samoa in ). 53 For more on this point, see Erman, Reconstruction and Empire, supra note 33; see also Lisa Maria Perez, Citizenship Denied: The Insular Cases and the Fourteenth Amendment, 94 VA. L. REV. 1029, (2008). 54 This dynamic continued after See, e.g., Downes, 182 U.S. at 287 (White, J., concurring). 55 See, e.g., United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898). 56 See, e.g., Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. 36 (1873); Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. 162 (1875); MICHAEL STOKES PAULSEN ET AL., THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES 930, (2010); KATHLEEN M. SULLIVAN & GERALD GUNTHER, CONSTITUTIONAL LAW (17th ed. 2010); RONALD D. ROTUNDA, MODERN CONSTITUTIONAL LAW (10 th ed. 2012); GREGORY E. MAGGS & PETER J. SMITH, CONSTITUTIONAL LAW (2 d ed. 2011); DANIEL A. FARBER ET AL., CASES AND MATERIALS ON CONSTITUTIONAL LAW 23-24, 68, (4th ed. 2009); GEOFFREY R. STONE ET AL., CONSTITUTIONAL LAW , (6th ed. 2009); PAUL BREST ET AL., PROCESSES OF CONSTITUTIONAL DECISIONMAKING , 1117, 1499 (5 th ed. 2006); DOUGLAS W. KMIEC ET AL., THE AMERICAN CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER 799, (3d ed. 2009); JESSE H. CHOPER, CONSTITUTIONAL LAW , 1321 (11 th ed. 2011); Maxwell v. Down, 176 U.S. 581 (1900); McDonald v. City of Chicago, 130 S. Ct. 3020, (2010); Erman, supra note 15, at 162 ( The Slaughter-House Cases (1873) virtually nullified the Privileges and Immunities Clause. ).

18 18 CITIZENS OF EMPIRE [2012 disagreed over legal legacies of the Civil War and their applicability to U.S. empire. Some asserted that following annexation Puerto Ricans would secure U.S. citizenship, eventual statehood, and full constitutional protections all in a bundle. 57 Others claimed that these three legal changes would reach Puerto Ricans not at all. 58 Federal administrators also variously weighed in on both sides. After extensive first-hand study of conditions in Puerto Rico, Special Commissioner for the United States to Porto Rico Henry Carroll recommended to the president that Puerto Ricans be made U.S. citizens with full constitutional rights and a traditional form of territorial government that would include a fully elected legislative branch. 59 Charles Magoon, the law officer for what came to be the Bureau of Insular Affairs in the War Department which had jurisdiction over Puerto Rico in the months after U.S. invasion went further, opining in mid-1899 that annexation had made the territory a part of the United States, and, as such, subject to the Constitution. 60 After becoming Secretary of War in August 1899, the prominent Republican Wall Street lawyer Elihu Root rejected such generous approaches to Puerto Rican status and rights. 61 He insisted that governance and hence the U.S. imperial experiment in Puerto Rico would inevitably fail without a course of tuition [for islanders] under a strong and guiding hand. 62 Islanders, he proposed, should have no say in who governed them with the possible exception of 57 See infra note 58. Observing the continuing power of U.S. citizenship as a basis for claiming rights and status, this study also contributes to a new chronology of the legal rollback of Reconstruction. In doing so, it builds on work suggesting that legal fights over legacies of the Civil War including the ability of former slaves and their descendants to access rights stretched into the 20 th century, at which point they intertwined with fights concerning the constitutionality of empire. On 20 th -century legal fights over the legacy of Reconstruction, see BRANDWEIN, supra note 3, at 1-7, 10, 18, , 238; supra note See, e.g., SPARROW, supra note 13, at 40-55; Cabranes, supra note 34, at ; Erman, Reconstruction and Empire, supra note HENRY K. CARROLL, REPORT ON THE ISLAND OF PORTO RICO 63 (1899). 60 Judge Magoon s Memorandum, WASH. POST, Apr. 12, 1900, 4 (quoting Charles E. Magoon s written May 1899 opinion). 61 JESSUP, supra note 35, at 22, 215; John Griggs to Elihu Root, 10 Aug. 1899, MD NARA 350/8/12/C ELIHU ROOT, THE MILITARY AND COLONIAL POLICY OF THE UNITED STATES 165 (1916).

19 2012] CITIZENS OF EMPIRE 19 being allowed to elect a lower legislative chamber. 63 In preparing to promote these positions and establish his Department as an authority on colonial governance, Root drafted a long, internal legal memorandum in support. 64 Magoon then revised his legal opinion, which was soon given wide distribution, in line with Root s views. 65 Reviewing the treaties and statutes through which the United States had acquired and governed prior acquisitions, Magoon argued that eventual statehood and full constitutional rights for U.S. territories were matters of political grace, not constitutional requirements. 66 Residents of the new acquisitions would be entitled to certain fundamental rights, Magoon conceded, though not jury trials. 67 They also would not be entitled to enter the United States, in Magoon s view, until the political branches made their places of residence part of the United States. 68 Turning to U.S. citizenship, Magoon deemed it too substantive to be universal among U.S. peoples. Because it carries with it great powers, rights, privileges, and immunities, he wrote, the Government exercises discretion in bestowing it. 69 In addition to the citizen, he added, is he who owes allegiance to our Government. 70 Such allegiance could be a temporary status, like the temporary allegiance owed by the alien domiciled in the country... during such residence. 71 And it could be an absolute and permanent 63 ROOT, supra note 62, at ; [Elihu Root?], Memorandum 2-36, 38-56, 61 (no date), MD NARA 350/5A/197/1444:9; 1 ANNUAL REPORTS OF THE WAR DEPARTMENT FOR THE FISCAL YEAR ENDED JUNE 30, REPORT OF THE SECRETARY OF WAR. MISCELLANEOUS REPORTS, pt. 1 at 3 (1899). 64 [Root?], supra note Id.; CHARLES E. MAGOON, REPORTS ON THE LAW OF CIVIL GOVERNMENT IN TERRITORY SUBJECT TO MILITARY OCCUPATION (3d ed. 1903); infra notes and accompanying text. 66 MAGOON, supra note 65, at Id., at Id., at Id., at Id., at Id., at

20 20 CITIZENS OF EMPIRE [2012 obligation that falls between citizenship and alienage. 72 elaborated: Thus, he There are many persons within the jurisdiction of the United States from whom allegiance in some form is due who are not citizens of the United States. Many soldiers in our Army, sailors in our Navy, seamen in our merchant marine, travelers, temporary sojourners, Indians, Chinese, convicted criminals, and, in another and limited sense, minors and women belong to this class. 73 Because the Treaty of Paris that transferred Puerto Rico from Spain to the United States vested Congress with discretion over the status of the native inhabitants of Puerto Rico, he indicated, Puerto Ricans owed absolute and permanent allegiance without yet being U.S. citizens. 74 In 1900, the legal-political landscape again shifted, largely in line with Root s recommendations that Puerto Ricans receive limited rights, status, and self-government. 75 Federal lawmakers enacted the Foraker Act, which in several ways protected nonjudicial federal officials discretion in governing Puerto Rico and the ostensibly more racially degraded Philippines. 76 While acknowledging the authority of the Court, lawmakers hoped in the act to create in Puerto Rico a form of government that could both first be challenged in court without risking an adverse ruling directly applicable to the Philippines and if the court issued a favorable ruling then be implemented in the Philippines. 77 They invited judicial review by imposing a modest tariff on U.S.-Puerto Rican trade in possible contravention of the constitutional bar on nonuniform tariffs for 72 Id. (2011). 73 Id., at Id., at 118, 120, passim. 75 CABÁN, supra note 13, at Foraker Act, Pub. L. No , 31 Stat. 77 (1900); see also infra note CONG. REC. 1946; GERARD N. MAGLIOCCA, THE TRAGEDY OF WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN